


Burn Your Biographies

by JaneTurenne



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22090111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneTurenne/pseuds/JaneTurenne
Summary: In which Braxiatel is a momma's boy, or an answer to the age old question of, "Brax, why must you be Like That?"
Comments: 18
Kudos: 58





	Burn Your Biographies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Irving-Braxiatel (Elycia7)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elycia7/gifts).



> A slightly belated New Year's present for [irving-braxiatel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elycia7/pseuds/Irving-Braxiatel), whose impeccable taste in character names clearly needed ~~stealing~~ paying-homage-to

“My sisters thought it was an unexploded torpedo, but _I_ knew it was a shooting star.” She gives her husband a dazzling smile, a hundred candles on their enormous Christmas tree glinting their golden sparkles in her eyes. “My people use them for making wishes on. And my shooting star certainly brought me everything I could ever have wished for.”

The two Time Tots on the hearthrug watch her with open adoration - her stories are the only time either of that pair of troublemakers is ever still. Her husband, in his armchair, glows with doting serenity. Only her older child, at the desk in the corner, keeps his dark head bent over his school-books, removed from the cozy family scene. He thinks, _Meteorites come from above, and mines explode from below, and your eyes are sharp enough to see the difference._

“They had been _so_ hard, those past few months.” Her voice cracks, and oh, it’s an _expert_ performance, her son can’t help but admire the artistry. “After the war ended, everything was so desolate and horrible.” She pulls out her handkerchief to dab her eyes, and the two children - too young yet for names or genders, Uninitiated - hurry over to comfort her. “But I had my reward in the end,” she says, putting one arm around each Time Tot. “When your father fell from the sky,” she kisses the curly head of her own loomling, “he brought me to a brighter and more beautiful world even than the one I grew up in.”

Her firstborn, too, is sharp-eyed. If he hadn’t once caught the fading red handprint on the face of a shamefaced chambermaid, maybe he’d never have done his research into the American Civil War. Maybe he’d never have learned just what kind of lost past his mother was forever mourning. 

Many years later he will look at his sibling’s little playmate, the Oakdown child his mother is currently snuggling as if they were her own, and wonder whether, without her, they ever would have called themself the Master.

“Irving.”

Braxiatel turns towards his father’s beckoning voice. “Come join the family,” Xenophonteioster instructs his son. “Surely your studies can wait for _one_ night, to celebrate your mother’s favorite holiday.”

Patience of House Lungbarrow stands, her many petticoats crinkling around her as she does. Braxiatel used to think that his mother’s insistence on the dress of her homeworld was an uncharacteristic weakness on her part, a sentimentality. Now he knows better. Nobody will ever forget that she is the Human on Gallifrey, no matter what she wears. Nobody will ever stop staring, but she can make their attention something that she demands instead of shrinks from.

She swims into Brax’s field of vision, her eyes _focused_ as they meet his, they way they never are with anybody else. He loves and shrinks from that gaze, what it means. _We are the same, my own, my flesh and blood. You alone can see me. I alone can see you._

She rests her hand on one of Brax’s cheeks and presses a kiss to the other. “Let him be, darling,” she tells Xenophon, a command so light that to obey feels more like benediction than subjugation. “There’s so much our Irving needs to know. He’s going to rule the universe someday.” That, he knows, is an order, too. She rests her forehead against her son’s. “I’m so proud of you.”

He resists the urge to step closer. He resists the urge to step back. No one else can see the tension in his muscles, but she feels it at this range, and gives him a tiny smile. As she pulls away, her two fingers brushing over his temples send him a memory: the day he was born, tiny and ugly and red, and the swelling, majestic _certainty_ as she looked at the little bundle in her arms. This, he knows, is the feeling she thinks of as love. Maybe she’s even right.

“Thank you, Mother,” Braxiatel murmurs, and turns away.

*

Theta grows up spoiled and uncorrected, impetuous and impossible, believing that their mother’s indulgence marks him for the favored son. Brax never bothers trying to disabuse him of that notion, not even when they fight. There are still uncrossable lines for Braxiatel. A few.

Still, Braxiatel knows the truth of it. The only positive emotion Patience ever understood was gratitude, and that she never felt for her younger child - or for Brax, either, as a person. She loved him for _what_ he was, not who: her shotgun baby, schemed into her belly through the good graces of a regeneration-sick Time Lord in a crashed TARDIS who barely understood how sexual reproduction even worked. Brax was her golden ticket out of the ruins of her half-burnt plantation house and onto a world that no member of her species had ever seen. That was what she saw when she looked at him. Her ambitions for him were a kind of thanks, as best she knew how to express them. 

Still, Brax does come close, once, to telling. “And tell me this, brother mine,” he snaps, exhausted after being pulled from his bed to bail his sibling out of jail for the fourth - or is it fifth? - time this year. “Granting, of _course_ , that your recklessness is _exactly_ what Mother wants in her children, that my dull, law-abiding ways make her ashamed, that you are the one truly building her legacy - why was _I_ the one she insisted on giving her name?”

( _He remembers one night when he was very small, watching as she brushed out her hair, unable to resist toying with the very tips of those endlessly long strands in their burnished Prydonian copper. She scooped him into her lap, told him about Clan Irvine, his ancestors and hers, proud in their ties to not one but two lines of kings. Nobody else on Gallifrey has hair this color, she told him proudly, and taught his clumsy little fingers to help with her braid, and he felt important in the way nobody else could ever make him feel.)_

Theta, of course, only rolls his eyes. “She couldn’t know what you’d grow up to be,” he says, with all of his usual impatience. 

Brax doesn’t point out the idiocy of that remark, when he is nothing that she did not make him. He only drags Theta home, and then takes his own bones - wearier than his loomed brother’s, more Human then than they should be - back to his own bed.

*

“Try again,” Patience says, with a sharpness that Theta and Xenophon would never recognize. Brax swallows the sigh that wants to escape him, feels the carbon dioxide of it poisoning his lungs.

“You look very pretty today, my lady,” he tries, barely disguising the adolescent crack in his voice. Just because he’s home from the Academy, ostensibly vacationing with his family, doesn’t mean that his lessons are on hold.

“Too straightforward,” Patience says, shaking her head. “Too simple. Real charm needs _individuality_ \- both yours and hers.” She would know better, if anyone else were listening, than to assume that his future spouse will necessarily be a woman. Brax is the only one who saw her horror when Theta and Koschei both settled on male pronouns. Her time and place in history, he has learned, was remarkably bountiful where its prejudices were concerned. 

“She needs to feel that you really see her,” Patience goes on, “and that there is something unusual in you that gives you that power. Proving you’re observant is one of the best ways for a gentleman to mark himself as exceptional without seeming to brag.”

He takes a breath and tries again, looking out at Gallifrey. “It was rather unkind of you to deny us the beauty of the mountains, my lady, when we’ve come all this way just to see them.”

She turns to him, tilting her head to one side. “Whatever do you mean, my lord Braxiatel?”

“I mean that you could hardly have expected anyone to look at anything else when you chose to wear that dress today.”

Her eyebrows raise. “Better,” she concedes. “But mind your cadence. It’s always stronger to end with the concrete. Next time, ‘to look at anything else today when you chose to wear that dress.’”

He nods his comprehension. “I think it might be easier,” he ventures, “if I had a better idea who it would be.”

She gives him a sympathetic expression as she straightens his collar. “I _am_ sorry that I couldn’t plan things as well for you as for Theta,” she says. “Still, it needn’t _necessarily_ be that appalling Goodlight crone. The ancient Heartshaven heir will die eventually, and they’ll need a replacement. I know it would be nicer not to have to wait, but a younger wife might be pleasant. You could make her into whatever you liked.”

“...Not _everyone_ gets married at all.”

He wants to take it back immediately, as she goes still. “Too good for you, is it?” she says, quietly. “To better your station by marriage?”

“No, Mother.”

“Too _human_ ?” Her eyes narrow. “Too much like _me_?”

He controls his breathing, with effort. “I will seek every kind of advantage available to me,” he says, emotionlessly.

“You’ll need to,” she snaps. “The rest of Gallifrey wants to see you as a freak, you know. An oddity at best, and a monster at worst. If you don’t strike first, they will tear you apart.”

He doesn’t look down. That would be worse. He focuses on the horizon. “Yes, Mother.”

She studies him closely for a moment, then strokes a thumb over his chin. “You’re my good boy,” she says, and turns away. “We’ll _make_ our advantages, if we need to. If that pesky Karnakdvoralentarax was to die suddenly, nobody would ever imagine it was anything but natural causes.”

Dissociation, Brax thinks. They’ve been learning about it in his psychology class. That’s the word for the way it feels when his mother talks like that, like she’s taken out her favorite silver letter opener and carved a space between his skin and his muscles, like he’s floating inside himself. 

People see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe. She has never told him this in words, but he learnt it from her, all the same. Who would ever, _ever_ listen, if he tried to tell?

“Safer to wait,” he says, as though he doesn’t care. “As you said, they are already very old.”

“I suppose,” Patience says.

She turns back and sees the discomfort in his posture. He braces himself, but instead of hardening, she melts. Closing the space between them she wraps him up in her arms, holding his unresisting body close.

“There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, my own boy,” she murmurs. “My little Rassilon.”

As always, what arrives first of Theta is the noise, all chatter and giggling and singing to himself as he scrambles his way up Mount Cadon, clambering the ladder onto their viewing platform. “Mama,” he says, dashing over, and she turns away from Brax, to his partial relief. “You’ve been gone for _ages_.”

“I have, haven’t I?” she says, grinning and laughing as lightly as a bird on an updraft. “My poor angel, were you _very_ bored without us?”

“ _Very_ ,” Theta pouts.

Patience turns back to Brax. “That’s all for today, I think, darling. You do deserve _some_ time to relax. You run along and play with your brother.”

Braxiatel goes back to his books instead, where someone else’s words will fill his head and push everything else out.

*

Brax is still young enough not to know how young, young enough for his sense of time to be fuzzy beyond the microspans, when his mother takes him to visit their house library.

There is nothing unusual in their going here together. She is ravenous for books, maybe even more than his father the professor, and Braxiatel inherited both their tastes. But today Patience has something particular in mind. He snuggles himself into her lap, in the enveloping folds of her skirts, as she pulls out a book that even he can see is very old, an enormous volume of oxblood leather and iron. 

He can’t ever remember not knowing how to read, and perhaps the only reason he still remembers that day was the intensity of his childish distress at not understanding the characters. In later years he will realize that the writing in it was Old High Gallifreyan. Either his mother taught herself both ancient and modern Gallifreyan in a matter of only perhaps five years, or else she lied to him outright about what the tome contained. Neither would surprise him. When he goes back searching as an adult, he can never find the book again to know for sure.

“And in the Last Days,” she reads, “will be the Most and Least Prydonian, a Time Lord of echoes and smoke. His name will become worlds even as his world grows nameless. He will be the shadow behind the Sun, and he will feed her fire until no more is left to burn.”

She traces his fingers over the words. “The most and least,” she says. “You see? That’s you, my sweeting. They will try to say that you are less, because I am your mother, but really you will be the best of all of them.”

The word for ‘sun’ is enough like its modern equivalent that he can nearly make it out. He watches her finger stroke lovingly over that character, a brightness in her eye.

“Mother,” he says, “I don’t _want_ to burn up.”

She looks sharply at him, displeased to be dragged from her reverie. But then she smiles, slips the book back onto its shelf, and carries her son off to bed.

*

It surprises Brax, sometimes, that his mother is never friendless. Gallifrey, beneath its shine, is vicious more often than not. They came first from curiosity, the gawping masses, and charm, as she taught him, is a powerful weapon. With how many wanted to catch a glimpse at first, it only stood to reason that Patience would convince some of them to stay. Beauty is flash-powder. Nobody cares to find the ugly underneath.

But among those she caught, there were a few bonds deeper than acquaintances dazzled by surface polish. She did have at least one _real_ friend, a Time Lady who responded, however subconsciously, to the poisoned steel under her silk.

“Danna.” Patience holds out both hands, smiling, and Brax thinks how fortunate it was for Patience, that gloves were custom where she came from, too.

“My Lady Patience,” says Danna, squeezing those hands in greeting. “You wanted to see me?”

“Always,” Patience says, dimpling, and spreading her skirts as she sits. “Do sit down, Danna. You’ve met my son, Irving?”

“Braxiatel,” Danna says, inclining her head. “You’ve grown.”

“Thank you, General.”

“He’s what I wanted to see you about,” says Patience. “I want you to train him.”

Danna turns to look at Patience, raising her eyebrows. “As a soldier?” She sits. “Not a usual High House ambition.”

“I don’t want him to _be_ a soldier.” There are wrinkles around Patience’s eyes these days - only faint ones, but there - and they tighten now. “Just trained as one. You and I both know that, however little one may expect ever to fight a war, it’s always better to know how.”

They share a look that Brax doesn’t understand yet, but has a horrible feeling that he will someday. “All right,” says Danna, after an evaluatory glance at Brax. “I won’t take the younger one, though.”

“Heavens, no,” Patience says, laughing. 

“And I won’t go easy on him.”

“I don’t want you to.” Patience looks Brax up and down. “If he dies, I’d be cross with you, of course, but crosser with him for letting himself get killed.”

Danna laughs. Braxiatel doesn’t.

“Well, then,” Danna says, “let’s get started, shall we?”

*

Danna gets Brax his first job out of the Academy, as a diplomatic attaché, working his way slowly up to ambassador.

She tries to get him his second job, too.

“Darling, don’t you see what a _wonderful_ opportunity this is? You’ll be working directly for the President - _and_ he’ll be in your debt.”

Patience may have wanted her son trained for war, but without understanding what that would mean for her. The lift of his chin isn’t an act anymore, and he couldn’t learn strategy from as sharp a mind as Danna’s without seeing, for the first time, that the opponent across the table is only one increasingly frail Human woman, old in her bones despite the face painted perfect as ever.

“No, Mother,” he says, with quiet assurance.

She makes a face. “Don’t be difficult, Irving.” 

“I am not,” he says, “a murderer.”

“An _assassin_ , thank you. It’s an official position, with a title and all. I do _adore_ Time Lords and their titles. You can make practically anything all right, if you call it by the proper name.”

“I won’t.”

She stands, with only a flicker less grace than usual, but with her hand tight around the handle of her walking stick.

“Haven’t I given enough?”

She walks towards him, eyes hard on his. “I wanted _one_ of you to have a backbone.” Her cane taps a beat against the polished floor, regular as a machine. “Your father is hopelessly weak, we all know that, and your brother is just like him - and that _daughter_ of his, my _god_ what a soppy little idiot - but I never gave any of them the _attention_ I gave you.” He is taller than she is now, but he doesn’t feel it when she straightens. “I taught you everything. Fought for every advantage for you - and tactfully, too, so no one would begrudge you. I’ve put you in a position to have anything you could ever dream of. And you’re too _weak_ to care.”

He is Irving Braxiatel. He has walked through minefields, graduated the Academy with a triple first and negotiated a cease-fire in the Monan Civil War. He can do this.

“No,” he says, and looks her in the eye. “I won’t be anybody’s trained killer. Not Pandad’s, and not yours.”

He should see it coming. He doesn’t. The crack of her cane across his cheekbone is so sharp and sudden that it sends him sprawling onto the carpet, eyes wide and lips parted, one hand raising to cradle his face.

“Don’t come near me again,” she says, already walking for the door, “until you decide to stop being a _disgrace_.”

*

He sits in the hall of Lungbarrow House, listening to the grandfather clock. The ticking that echoed through every day of his childhood only belonged to the one resident of the house who ever needed it. He’s only just realized that.

A door opens and his father slips out, feet shuffling to preserve the hush. Brax already knows what he’s going to say, and spares Xenophon the discomfort.

“She won’t see me,” says Brax.

Slowly, reluctantly, Xenophon shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Irving.”

Brax rests a hand on his father’s shoulder. “I’m fine,” he says. “Go back inside.”

“Are you certain that…”

“Go,” Brax repeats. “You don’t have time to waste.”

Xenophon hesitates one more second, then nods and hurries back into the sickroom. Brax settles back to staring at the door.

Something moves in his peripheral vision.

Brax follows the flicker by instinct, and then more consciously. His feet carry him into what quickly becomes a chase, against a shadow intruder who clearly knows these halls. Brax only remembers that he is unarmed when they turn into a dead end, and he finds a staser pressed against his chest.

“Don’t worry,” says a familiar voice. “Shooting you would hardly be in my own best interests.”

He looks up in bewilderment, knowing who he’s seeing even though it makes no sense. His older self spins the staser - a plain, unostentatious weapon, made for other things than looking at - to offer Brax the hilt.

“Are you sure you don’t want to do it?” his older self asks him. “You’d probably regret it, but I regret that I didn’t.” His mouth moves in a gruesome curl that is nothing like a smile. “She does always win in the end.”

Brax takes the staser without thinking, clutching it to his belly. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re going to be seeing a lot of one another from now on.” The older Braxiatel leans against the wall, studying his young self. 

“This is…” _Illegal_ is too small of a word, but looking at his older eyes, it feels childish to say _wrong_. “...dangerous.”

“The universe is dangerous. She was right about that.” His older self sighs. “I wish I could tell you that she was the worst thing in it. Though I will admit, I’m not certain I’ve ever known _worse_.”

Brax straightens his spine as best he can. “Why are you here?” he repeats.

“Marionettes.” The older Brax straightens his cuffs. “Everyone has strings - and _you_ , my boy, have never once moved for yourself. When that lifeline is cut,” he looks in the direction of their parents’ bedroom, “you’d collapse in a heap, if someone were not here to catch it.”

Brax’s eyes darken. All the fury bottled in his lungs for a lifetime, all the longing for freedom, batter their wings against his parting lips.

“Pandad is going to have you killed tonight,” says the older Brax.

“ _What_?”

“Well, to try. You are a security risk. He did not take kindly when we declined his job offer - and I cannot entirely blame him. In his place, would _you_ want anyone knowing you had resurrected the title of Burner? And the timing is clever, you must admit. He expects you to be distracted by grief, and that our death may be passed off as a suicide. A double advantage.”

Brax looks down at the staser in his hand. “Kill or be killed, then,” he says, dully.

“Now you’re learning.”

The older Brax pushes off from the wall, strolling to a doorway that doesn’t belong, and opens it into his TARDIS. “If it’s any consolation,” he says, turning back to give himself one more look, “ _I_ will not ask you to pretend that you love me.”

The groan of the departing TARDIS harmonizes with a wail of loss from the direction of his mother’s deathbed.

Braxiatel tucks his staser safely away beneath his robes, and walks away.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [Scar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asoldandtrueasthesky/pseuds/President%20Romana) for the beta!


End file.
